Anyway, in the course of that research, I stumbled across a mention of his last book (published in 1932) which, to my utter amazement, was entitled Archaic Tracks Round Cambridge. That was a surprise. I quickly discovered that it is long out of print and that second hand copies are being sold for well over £100. However, to my delight, I discovered that the wonderful Europeana Collections site not only has this short book available as a good quality pdf scan but also The Old Straight Track. I've put links to them below.

As, I say, I personally don't buy his theories—and Archaic Tracks (from which the plan on the right is taken) is even less convincing than The Old Straight Track!—but I do continue to benefit from Watkins' uncanny ability to enthuse and encourage a person to get out into the landscape themselves and to see what they can see. I spoke a bit about this in my last post but here are Watkins' words that close his Cambridge book. I think you'll see what I mean:"Adventure lies lurking in these lines where I point the way for younger feet than mine. Detective work of sorts; unnoticed mark-stones almost buried in the banks of cross-roads, in the field, or on a town pavement; the edges of an unrecorded camp; a faint mound almost levelled; or, again on the ley of the land, as the eye looks straight on, the point of a distant beacon-hill as a mark on the sky-line.Who will strike the trail?"

Religious naturalist and Unitarian minister in Cambridge UK, jazz bass player, photographer, cyclist and walker.
Over the years I've tried various descriptions of "where I'm at" but, although they have been OK as far as they go, they've not fitted as well as they might. These days I find the following words of the philosopher, Paul Wienpahl, fit the bill better than anything else:

"As I see it, the point is not to identify reality with anything except itself. (Tautologies are, after all, true.) If you wish to persist by asking what reality is; that is, what is really, the answer is that it is what you experience it to be. Reality is as you see, hear, feel, taste and smell it, and as you live it. And it is a multifarious thing. To see this is to be a man without a position. To get out of the mind and into the world, to get beyond language and to the things is to cease to be an idealist or a pragmatist, or an existentialist, or a Christian. I am a man without a position. I do not have the philosophic position that there are no positions or theories or standpoints. (There obviously are.) I am not a sceptic or an agnostic or an atheist. I am simply a man without a position, and this should open the door to detachment"Paul Wienpahl in An Unorthodox Lecture (1956)